League of Legends final changes before season 3 starts

The time is finally upon us. With ranked play being disabled yesterday and now with the servers down for maintenance, it can only mean one thing – Season 3 is going live in League of Legends. Riot has posted the patch notes as well as a League System Patch Preview video. It's so on right now, things are about to get very very real in Summoner's Rift.

The biggest and newest change will be the brand new League System. We're talking the abolishment of ELO and something completely new and different. Depending on your current ELO and highest ELO, you will be placed in a Tier and then a Division within that tier. There are six types of tiers and 5 divisions within each tier. As you play ranked, you'll earn points when you win and lose them on losses.

Once you get enough league points you'll start an Advancement Series which is a best out of three matches. If you win you'll jump up a division. Once you reach enough league points in the highest division you will enter a Promotion Series. This is a best out of five, if you win you jump to the bottom tier of the next Division. This way you are constantly climbing, you aren't just a large statistical number.

The three characters on the chopping block for this patch are Shaco, Olaf, and Master Yi. The recent jungle changes made it a bit too easy for Shaco to start off strong. His boxes were tanking the jungle mobs too and with full health and his bag of tricks, his ganks were dominating early game. Riot wanted to make Shaco more red buff dependent. Thus they are reducing the slow on his shiv and reduced the distance on his deceive.

In the last tournaments, Olaf has been dominating top. The season 3 changes made it easy for him to just build a ton of health and not worry about anything. He was getting all the other needed stats for free. On top of that, there wasn't a chance to really engage on him. Riot wanted to give Olaf windows of vulnerabilities. They removed the passive armor pen on his ult and made it only on use. Riot has also increased some of his cooldowns to make him more engageable.

I've personally seen a ton of AP Yis recently. That heal is so damn annoying. As a primarily mid player, his alpha strike is one of the hardest abilities I've come across to dodge. They've changed Yi to make him still viable but less ridiculous. They lowered his AP ratio on meditate to half but increased its base power. This will make AP Yis less invincible and make AD Yis have a better heal. Morellonomicon FTW.

Other noticeable changes on champions are Annie's visual upgrade (yay), Cho'Gath's silence duration has been reduced, Katarina will be doing slightly less damage with her abilities but more damage on her ult – Riot wants her to get away from the Warmogs' meta, Nasus, Veigar, and Sion get more bonus far larger minions and mobs with their progressive farming abilities, and Volibear is getting an increased attack speed to better jungle.

There will be a new item called the Seeker's Armguard - 1160 gold, 30 armor, 25 ability power, unique passive that grants 0.5 bonus armor and ability power stacking up to 30 times. This item is to attempt to counter the AD mids right now. It will also build into the Hourglass to give it use early and late game. Giant's belts are losing 20 HP on. Warmogs and Sunfire Capes are becoming more expensive. These changes are to try to break up the Warmogs' meta.

The last thing I want to talk about it matchmaking. There will be a new matchmaking system that will now take into account matchmaking rating and number of wins in the player's current queue when creating matches. Ideally, matches will be more even now which is good for everyone and their current skill level. I like these changes and can't wait to try them out live. It should only be a few more hours now. What division and league did you get put into?